School representatives to seek injunction against Coatesville Area

WEST CHESTER — Leaders of the Graystone Academy Charter School are scheduled to appear Fridayin Common Pleas Court as they seek to stop the Coatesville Area School Board from revoking its charter.

The school, which has been the subject of an on-going dispute with the school board since 2011, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to forbid the board from holding public hearings on its move to revoke Graystone’s charter, initially granted in 2000.

The board issued a notice of revocation to Graystone in November, in the wake of the news that the charter school had stopped offering classes to students in sixth through eighth grades; it now operates as a kindergarten through fifth grade school. The board wants to hold public hearings on the revocation, in accordance with state law.

The preliminary injunction request, which the board has objected to by saying it would intrude on its statutory responsibility to determine whether the charter is operating legally, is scheduled to be heard by Judge Anne Marie Wheatcraft.

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Attempts to contact attorneys for the school district and the charter school were unsuccessful Monday. The injunction request was filed in early December.

The revocation notice in November marked the second time the district began proceedings to revoke the charter for Graystone, which was formed more than a decade ago to focus on young students in the district, many of whom are minorities whose parents felt they were not being served by the district’s programs.

In March 2011, the board alleged that Graystone had failed to carry out several promised academic programs and policies, and also accused it of missing academic benchmarks and fiscal-management standards, and began proceedings to revoke its charter.

At the time, Graystone President Jack Stollsteimer, the former Philadelphia Safe Schools Advocate, said the district wanted to close the school to save money. The district paid about $4.4 million during the 2011-12 school year to Graystone under the per pupil allocation required by the state charter school law.

The school appealed the board’s first vote to revoke the charter, and that process is still ongoing before the state’s Charter Appeals Board.

In June, Graystone’s board of directors voted to eliminate its sixth- through eighth-grade classes, saying it would better meet the needs of the community by concentrating on the lower elementary grades.

It also eliminated the position of chief executive officer.

Later that month, Coatesville superintendent Richard Como announced an outreach effort to the students who had been displaced by the charter’s move.

The district presented figures showing that the district had more students score proficiently on the state standardized tests than Graystone both overall and in every subgroup they are required to report to the state.

District Solicitor James Ellison said he believed the charter school eliminated school choices by eliminating three grades without any notice to parents. Como said the decision to eliminate three grades was also made without any notification or consultation with the school district.

Ellison said the charter school needed to ask permission from the chartering district, which in this case is Coatesville, in order to make any decisions that would make the school no longer in compliance with its charter.

Because Graystone’s original charter allows for a school serving kindergarten through eighth grade, Ellison suggested that it had violated state law. A charter can be revoked for “one or more material violations of any of the conditions, standards or procedures contained in the written charter.”

In response to the school’s request for a preliminary injunction against the public hearings, the school board said such a move would deprive it of its oversight responsibility for the charter.

“In attempting to halt the public hearings … (Graystone) is depriving its student to the right to a proper education,” the board response said. It would also keep the public from participating in open hearings on the school’s charter.